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Jawa Tech Industries
Jawa Tech Industries: The Corporate History Jawa Tech Industries is an intergalactic trading / technology company founded in 957 BTC by Skettic Thelt after the Czerka Corporation’s failed attempt at mining the unstable ore loads that were on the planet of Tatooine. Czerka Corp, deciding that exporting the large sandcrawlers off-planet was not worth the expense, abandoned them to the deserts. The Jawas, especially Thelt, were quick to take advantage of such a windfall, and searched the Great Dune Sea for all the operational sandcrawlers they could find. While most of these massive machines were still in perfect functioning order, a few were too damaged to use and were scavenged of and usable items. To this day you can still see the hollow skeletons of these once powerful machines scattered across the desert. Skettic Thelt, a Jawa of renown during this time, collected several dozen of these working crawlers and used them for transport, shelter, and mobile trading centers. Scavengers by nature, Jawas use their skills to track down and recover lost technological items such as droids, ship wrecks, and other materials. They then quickly refurbish these items and sell them to local inhabitants. Jawas have also been known to perform a bit of “'Pre-salvage” '''''on items that might still be owned by others. The Jawas have a motto of, “If you didn’t want us to have it, you would have locked it up better.”'' Thelt used his scavenging and sales skills to become the biggest trader on the planet of Tatooine. Feeling that there were more ways to increase his profits by drawing in more off-planet customers, he formed Jawa Tech Industries. The original mandate of the corporation was to salvage and resell technological items to planet based and off-world customers. But to make this happen, he had to set up a fixed base of operations. Since Jawas tend to be a nomadic race, getting other Jawas to see the brilliance of his idea was for a time a hard sell. Jawas move around because that is the only way to find the technological items they need to use in trade. Thelt's idea was to use his fleet of Sandcrawlers to search the deserts for prime items, then bring those items back to a central base for repair and resale. This central location made it easier for repair of these finds, and to have a place to maintain his Sandcrawler fleet. It also allowed him to have in-house inventory for off-world shipment and shipment to the local population. So in 954 BTC, Thelt acquired a former ore refinery complex on the edge of the Dune Sea, and based his empire there. But Thelt quickly found that with this new infrastructure, came new responsibilities. Shortly after he set up operations, his outlying warehouses were raided by Sand People. While little was taken, much of his starting inventory was destroyed. Thelt, determined to make this new system work, set up force shields and intrusion detection monitors to notify him of the marauding bands of Sand People who would travel through the area. Next, with a lucky find in the Dune Sea by one of his Sandcrawlers, he was able to acquire a large cache of HK- 3 Assassin Droids for perimeter security and defense. With the security side of the operation now taken care of, Thelt was able to get the communications array repaired and re-established, allowing for contact with off-planet buyers and sellers. By 952 BTC, after the last of the problems were worked out, Thelt's trading company took off. While not a populous planet, Tatooine has been a stopover point for generations of pilots, pirates, and privateers. With this large influx and out flux of travel by people who did not always get along well with each other, the planet has been littered with the remains of starships, cargo, and other useful items. Some these items tend to be worth a lot of credits to the right individuals. Thelt used his ever growing list of contacts to keep the merchandise flowing off of the planet. By 949 BTC Jawa Tech Industries was not only the largest supplier of Tech items on Tatooine, but was branching out into the import business as well. Many traders from across the galaxy would come to Jawa Tech to off-load cargo at a decent profit. From droids to evaporators, Blasters to Bio-couplers, if you needed it, Skettic Thelt and Jawa Tech Industries to get it. Skettic Thelt lived on Tatooine until his death at the age of 92 (which is quite old for a Jawa). The company was passed on to his 48 sons, who continued the same business plan as their father. The company has survived thru the centuries, still using some of the original sandcrawlers that were left by the Czerka Corporation over 950 years ago. The company has added a first-class Research and Development section, working on cutting edge technology to help not only Jawa Tech Industries, but the Republic as well. Jawa Tech Industries is a recognized leader in the field of Tech Salvage and Refurbishment and will continue to meet the needs of their customer base galaxy wide. Jawa Tech Industries - R&D Divisions Jawa Transport Balloon (JTB) Today, JTI has branched out into the Research and Development Sector. Their staff of scientists and in-house development team has come up with several new and exciting finds. In the year 4BTC, they saw a need for covering vast areas of the Dune Sea in a faster mode than the Sandcrawlers they had been using since the birth of the company. While newer Crawlers have been purchased, the newer models still have the slow pace of the ones from almost 1000 years earlier. Having a top speed of only 30 km/h, sandcrawlers are by no means the fastest method of delivery. While speeders can move items to customers faster, they have the disadvantage of size. You simply can't deliver a large quantity of droids on a speeder, and while you can move up to 1500 droids in a sandcrawler, it's speed makes fast deliveries an impossible task. So the R&D division developed the Jawa Transport Balloon or JTB. The Transport Balloon was the brainchild of Kweyyit Thelt, a distant relative of the founder, Skettic Thelt. he took an Ion Containment Vessel from an old Mon Calamari Transport and fitted it with a modified Girodyne Ka/La steam powered fusion reactor unit from an old sandcrawler that was due for the scrapyard. He added a main lifting repulsor unit from the same Calamari transport, as well as directional repulsors to aid in direction control and thrust. Internally, the crew levels are small to accommodate Jawa-sized personnel, with a large holding area in the middle that can hold up to 75 droids. The gondola below is for extra cargo or space for human-sized passengers. With a top speed of 50 km/h (unaided by wind forces), the Jawa Transport Balloon can cross terrain that a sandcrawler would have to detour around. This addition to the Jawa Tech Industries fleet has greatly increased their planet-side delivery times, as well as making it harder for the indigenous tribes of Sand People to raid the high-value cargo carried inside. But as with all new technology, The new aerial transport system had a rough start. Jawas are not normally known to pilot space craft, and until now, none have ever been seen piloting interplanetary or interstellar craft. So the initial obstacle was finding a Jawa that would go up in the transport system and pilot it. As all the crew levels inside are built to Jawa scale, humans could not get in and test the ship out. They did attempt to have a astromech droid fly it, but with the restraining bolt installed to keep it from running away, it also actuated the built-in safety protocol that causes the piloting functions of the droid to shut off until the bolt is removed. This sub-routine was installed to prohibit the use of stolen droids to pilot craft against the will or wishes of the owner. Before the sub-routine was installed, people would steal droids, bolt them, then use them to steal ships in various starports around the galaxy. Ship builders and droid manufacturers, after many complaints and a Senate Investigation, collaborated to install a failsafe mechanism into all new ships and droids. The failsafe would not allow a ships computer to interface with a droid equiped with a restraining bolt, and droids were unable to access their Ship Astrogation sub-routines with a restraining bolt installed. After some searching, an intrepid and daring Jawa, Fhoggit Snees, volunteered to fly the first mission. After several minutes of explanation by the technical support staff, Fhoggit boarded the ship. Once all systems were checked and verified, Fhoggit fed power into the Girodyne fusion generator and the balloon lifted off. Rising straight up into the crisp Tatooine air, the balloon very quickly reached 7,000 meters in altitude. Unfortunately, the command deck, nor the rest of the ship, were sealed or pressurized, and Fhoggit passed out due to lack of oxygen. Luckily for the company, (and Fhoggit) the support staff had installed an override system and brought the balloon back down to the surface for evaluation and testing. Fhoggit Snees recovered from the oxygen depravation, and when the technical support team was ready for the next round of testing, Fhoggit was there ready to go again. The second test run went much smoother than the first. The support team installed altitude limiters that would keep the balloon to a safe 3,000 meter maximum altitude. They also enclosed the command deck and installed pressurization throughout the ship. While 3,000 meters was the maximum altitude for normal operations, it could be overridden in the event of a sand storm, allowing the balloon to rise over it if necessary. The pressurization of the ship allowed the ever pervasive dust to be kept to a minimum. Normally, the dust would not be a problem, as it is a constant in everyday Tatooine life, but as one of the company officials was quoted as saying, "Why carry dust? It takes up cargo weight. The more dust in the ship, the less cargo we can carry." Fhoggit, having spent the down time after the first flight in a simulator, was able to take the balloon on it's test trials and the ship performed quite well. The top speed of the balloon as stated by Jawa Tech Industries has given the balloon a top speed of 50 km/h(unaided by wind), it is believed that the balloon can actually travel much faster. It has been tracked on windless days at speeds of almost 75 km/h. Computer analysis of the design shows that aerodynamically, the ship has a theoretical top speed of 122 km/h (unaided by wind), but over that, the structure of the balloon would begin to experience harmonic vibration problems that could destroy the ship. The maneuvering repulsors allow the balloon ship to handle with precision. The sponson repulsor units are able to vector aim their repuslor fields at 37.5 degrees vertically (up and down) and 65.4 degrees horizontally (left and right) from the mount centerpoint. This gives it the ability to perform station-keeping over a set ground point in winds of up to 25 km/h. The abilities of this new aerial transport balloon have allowed Jawa Tech Industries to get cargo to almost any place on Tatooine faster than an crawler ever could. A New Plan... Theta III Stealth Transport Balloon (STB) While the aerial transport helped aid in faster deliveries, there was still the problem of ground fire from the Sand People that roamed the Dune Sea. So Kweyyit Thelt set out to try and find a way to protect the balloon without adding additional weight to the machine, thus lowering its carrying capacity. After months of work in the corporate science lab, Kweyyit came up with a novel idea...What if the balloon could turn invisible? If you can't see it, then you can't shoot at it. Finally, in 2 BTC, Kweyyit was able to bring his new development to fruition. The Theta III Stealth Transport Balloon, or STB. Kweyyit and the entire JTI corporation allowed us to be the first to witness this new technology, and to put it bluntly, we were blown away. For the first time, it is now possible for a balloon, or any other item for that matter, to disappear from the visible spectrum. While there are still some bugs to work out in the Infrared and Ultraviolet range, the balloon, by the addition of a proprietary paint formula, can become totally invisible by activating an electric charge. In the picture below, you can see the before and after pictures of the new technology being implemented. By the addition of the Stealth Paint and an electric current, Jawa Tech Industries has vaulted to the forefront of Stealth Technology. Our experts were able to decode the precisely installed paint scheme, and this is what they were able to determine: Jawa Tech Industries Stealth Balloon YOU NO SEE ME Kweyyit Thelt has determined that this will save thousands of credits annually in repairs to the hull of the balloon fleet from transient groundfire. Kweyyit was quoted as saying, "This new technology makes evil Sandpeople stop shooting at balloons! If you no see me, you no shoot me!" Kweyyit has now gone back into the R&D lab to pursue more technological improvements for the company. He was overheard saying that, "Crawlers are always getting shot at by Sandpeople and others who dislike these large vehicles moving across the sands, but what if we could change that?" What his intentions are are unknown, but stay tuned for further updates. A New Chapter in Sandcrawler Technology From then til now... For almost 1000 years, sandcrawlers have been a part of the Tatooine landscape. Brought to the planet by Czerka Corporation 959 BTC as part of the companies failed "Ore Recovery Project 325-D" program, sandcrawlers have been like giant metal Dewbacksroving arcross the Dune Sea. Approximately 75% of the original 349 Czerka crawlers are still in active use on Tatooine today. While some are nothing more than rusting, empty shells, totally stripped of any useful parts, 117 of the 261 that are still in operation today are owned by Jawa Tech Industries. These sandcrawlers are used by the company to recover parts, droids, and other technological items that are scattered across Tatooine. With a top speed of 30 km/h across the surface, even a Huttese sail barge has no problem out running these large, slow ships of the sand. Which makes it a problem for JTI when it come to defense of these extremely valuable assets. Luckily, the Czerka model sandcrawlers that were brought to Tatooine were the "CZX-53 Exploratory-Mining Crawler, Sand, Heavy-Duty'''" type that are used in extreme exo-environmental conditions. These crawlers are armored to withstand almost any condition a planet could throw at them, and have some offensive/defensive modules built in for protection. While they are not combat tanks, they can take punishment that a normal crawler could not, and can dish out enough firepower to run off all but the most persistant and heavily-armed attackers. While some crawlers have been destroyed by air to surface fire from spacecraft, to date, no crawler has been taken by the typical pirate/raiders that cross the Dune Sea. Sand People have been know to attack the crawlers, but most times they are harrassment attacks to drive the crawlers away from tribal ritual area or burial sites. It is a known fact that the nomadic Desert Jawas have conducted trade with the indigenous Sand People for several hundred years, but details of those dealing are sketchy and full of exaggerations. The sandcrawlers have been used for the recovery of useful salvage on the surface of the planet, but until now the only items they could recover were those that were within 1 to 5 meters of the surface. Anything deeper was not practical or profitable to salvage due to the need for specialized search sensors used to scan for items buried under the sand. Czerka Corp, not wanting the sandcrawlers to be used for ore mining after they left, removed the deep search and recovery sensors from all the sandcrawlers they left behind. These original sensors units allowed the sandcrawlers to search to depths of 200 meters below the surface, and then using the vacuum dredge recovery systems, recover ore deep under the sand. Jawa Tech did attempt to overcome this problem by putting sensor units on the crawlers that were removed from crashed ships, but these lacked the power or abilities to probe the depths of the original sensor suites. The new sensors installed ended up being used more for perimeter intrusion detection and very shallow metal detection of possible salvageable items. The search begins... After many years of searching the galaxy and expending a large number of credits, Jawa Tech Industries was able to find a limited number of the original sensor suites that were installed on the sandcrawlers. Kweyyit Thelt, head of Research and Development, had one of these sensor systems installed on a sandcrawler and took it out for a test evaluation. The results were unbelievable. The newly re-installed sensors found ore to depths of almost 200 meters. While the ore was of no interest to the company, the buried shipwrecks that they found were. The number of shipwrecks that Jawa Tech discovered during the test trials is a highly guarded secret. We have estimated the number of wrecks found by using the number of reported crashes that happen on average each year and the annual sand accumulation and movement in meters/year over a 100 year period. We arrived at an estimated 10,000 shipwrecks that are within the 200 meter sensor depth scattered across the Dune Sea. While this is just an estimation, we feel that it is probably a low number. Even so, it gives Jawa Tech a very large number of sources for salvage. But even with the new sensors to find the salvageable wrecks, JTI still had a problem... Originally, the Sandcrawlers were able to mine ore down to a depth of 200 meters using the vacuum dredging systems installed. But the way the mining was executed for ore would destroy any piece of salvagable technology they might find now. The vacuum dredge mining rigs used on the original Czerka Corp Sandcrawlers were called "Thump Guns". They got this nickname from the way they worked. The Dredges would have a ring of 7 lasers that would fire into the ore vein in front of the suction system. Once the lasers vaporized bore holes in the ore, Charge guns would fire Focus-Charge Thermal Detonators down each bore hole. The number could vary per bore hole, depending on the ore vein and the direction and intensity of the blast required. When the charges were detonated, they would create a shock wave that would fracture and break up the ore for suction by the dredge. The explosion deep underground would be felt as a thump on the surface, hence the name "Thump Guns". While this method worked great for ore extraction, it is not so wonderful for the delicate salvage items found on the wrecks that have been buried by 100 meters or more of sand. Again Czerka Corp, in the attempt to prevent the crawlers from being used for ore recovery, removed all but 25 meters of dredge pipe from the sandcrawlers before they were abandoned. Kweyyit Thelt knew there had to be a way to get to the buried shipwrecks without destroying them, but how? After many months of secret research and testing, He felt that he had found a way... If you can't bring the sand dune to Cherrop... Deep Crawler 1 Kweyyit Thelt's solution to getting the salvage from the buried wrecks was a simple one: If you can't bring the wrecks up, send the crawler down. "It was a very simple solution once I put my mind to it", Kweyyit said during our interview with him at the Jawa Tech Industries headquarters, "I thought why not go down to the wrecks and salvage them in place instead of trying to move all the sand out of the way to reach them." So Kweyyit and the R&D team set out to make a sandcrawler a sand submersible. Using a blower technique that is still highly classified, they inject air into the sand around the crawler, causing it to settle down into the sand. While not a fast process, we were told that the crawler could reach depths of almost 150 meters. We asked them how the crawlers were retrieved after they went down, and we were told that the process is reversed. Air is injected to the front and sides of the crawler, and the crawler slowly moves upward under its own power. The process of returning to the surface is thought to use the front slope of the crawler as a lifting wedge. As the sand density around the crawler is lessened by the air injection system, the crawler treads start to move forward. As the crawler begins to move, the front slope of the crawler forces the craft upward. While the exact process is a guarded trade secret, it is felt that while unorthodox, the process is a workable solution to recovering the salvageable items from wrecks buried deep in the Dune Sea sands. The second important benefit of the ability to submerge the crawler is the protection offered by the depths. Once submerged, the crawler is practically undetectable by visual means. This prevents the crawlers from being attacked while stopped when crossing hostile territory. They can simply submerge the crawler, and then when ready to continue the journey, surface and move off across the sands. Kweyyit is hoping to improve the technology, allowing the crawlers to travel submerged across the Dune Sea. While the speed would be much slower, the ability to avoid attacks and salvage wrecks as they progress would mean increased profits for the company. Kweyyit said that as more crawlers are retrofitted with the original sensor suites, and have been modified with the next generation submergence systems, he hopes that the possiblilities of attacks will be a thing of the past. "This will allow us to salvage in areas we have previously been unable to work, Sand People do not want us in some of the prime salvage areas, but they can't stop what they can't reach!" JTI Jawa.jpg|Kweyyit Thelt - Head of Research and Development - Jawa Tech Industries JTI security.jpg|Jawa Tech Industries - HK-50 Security and Defense Droids - Patrolling the test area jawatech002.jpg|Jawa Tech Industries - Deep Crawler 1 - Crawler, Submersible, Sand crawler closeup.jpg|Deep Crawler 1 - Close up view JAWATECH003.jpg|Deep Crawler 1 - Surfacing after Test Trials in the Dune Sea